The Ten Commandments are considered “the background and foundation of Israelite law,” according to Walter Harrelson, distinguished professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
The tenth injunction is against coveting that which is not your own, but your neighbor’s: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, male or female slave, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
Robert Sellers
Sometimes the word translated as “covet” is rendered as “envy” — you shall not envy someone else for what they possess. This emotion is generally understood as negative and self-damaging. Matshona Dhliwayo, a philosopher and author born in Zimbabwe but based in Canada, writes that envy is “admiration laced with resentment.”
But Episcopal priest, emeritus professor and bestselling author Barbara Brown Taylor has identified a certain kind of envy as not only good, but holy.
Envy that is holy
In beautiful prose, her book Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others relates her commission of righteous covetousness. Taylor says her book is “the story of a Christian minister who lost her way in the church and found a new home in the classroom,” teaching at Piedmont College, a small liberal arts university in Northeast Georgia.
The course she most frequently taught was not preaching — although a survey by Baylor University named her “one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world.” Instead, Taylor was tasked with teaching Religions of the World.
Introducing her experience, Taylor explains:
As soon as she recovered from the shock of meeting God in so many new hats, she fell for every religion she taught. When she taught Judaism, she wanted to be a rabbi. When she taught Buddhism, she wanted to be a monk. It was only when she taught Christianity that the fire sputtered, because her religion looked so different once she saw it lined up with the others.
Rather than being startled because she felt drawn to the religions she was encountering in her class preparation and instruction or feeling ashamed that as a Christian — and indeed a priest — she was enriched by those encounters, Brown believed God was using her new experiences to teach her an important lesson:
“Taylor believed God was using her new experiences to teach her an important lesson.”
The same Spirit that called me into the church called me out again, to learn the difference between the living water and the well. As surely as the priesthood had given me a sturdy bucket for dipping into that well — and as clearly as I could smell the elemental depths of the divine mystery every time I bent over to draw some of it up — the well was not the water. It was a container and not the source. My Episcopal well, beloved as it was, was no longer enough for me to live on.
Jesus astonished his disciples by talking with a Samaritan woman near the village of Sychar and for being willing to drink from a non-Jewish well. Many contemporary Christians have written about the wisdom of engaging followers of other faiths and “drinking” from their alien, or multifaith, wells.
Benedictine abbess, popular lecturer and prolific spirituality writer Joan Chittister argues our common humanity justifies our drawing from other wells:
Whatever the distinctions of time, place and culture, whatever the time and place in which we have lived, we are all human beings — just human beings, wherever and whenever we live, subject to the same emotional limits, dealing with the same range of emotional responses. … We have at our fingertips … a reservoir of wisdom as broad as the sky, as deep as history.
Jay McDaniel, professor of religion and one of the world’s foremost ecotheologians, suggests we should drink from other wells because our own water may be less than pure. He says, “Many people in different religions are realizing that the water is polluted, and that in order to cease polluting it, they need not only to dig within their own heritages for help but also to learn from other religions.”
Matthew Fox, Dominican priest and author “silenced” by the Vatican for his Creation Spirituality, argues the source of water in all the tributaries is the very same Divine River. James 1:17 calls this common “River” the “Father of Lights.” Fox insists:
There is one underground river — but there are many wells into that river: an African well, a Taoist well, a Buddhist well, a Jewish well, a Muslim well, a goddess well, a Christian well, and aboriginal wells. …To go down a well is to practice a tradition, but we would make a grave mistake (an idolatrous one) if we confused the well itself with the flowing waters of the underground river. Many wells, one river.
Drawing from other spiritual wells, Taylor discovered the water could be refreshing, even life-giving. Realizing the “taste” was sometimes quite different from the customary water she drew from her Christian well — and that it was strangely invigorating — she felt envious, writing:
My spiritual covetousness extended to the inclusiveness of Hinduism, the nonviolence of Buddhism, the prayer life of Islam, and the sacred debate of Judaism. Of course, this list displays all the symptoms of my condition. It is simplistic, idealistic, overgeneralized, and full of my own projections. It tells you as much about what I find wanting in my own tradition as it does about what I find desirable in another.
“Particular facets of animism, Hinduism, Chinese religions and Islam gave me holy envy.”
Living for a quarter century in Indonesia, I observed, encountered and befriended many people who faithfully followed religious paths other than Christianity. While I never considered not being a Christ-follower, there were some elements of the most commonly practiced religions on Java and Bali I admired. To use Taylor’s language, I might say those particular facets of animism, Hinduism, Chinese religions and Islam gave me holy envy.
I was impressed by the way animists, or folk religionists, sensed the divine living all around them and regulated their daily lives in ways that attended to pleasing those spirits. They made me realize many Christians, including me, are not aware enough of the presence of the Spirit in our lives, acting instead as if our welfare depends entirely upon our own initiative and effort.
I was astonished by how Hindus approach special days in their spiritual calendars with an attitude of delightful joy and festivity, decorating their houses and roadways with palm branches, bringing food offerings to tiny altars and wearing clothing that honors the particular manifestation of the deity they are worshipping. Their attention to detail made me wonder if the ways we celebrate Christmas and Easter are too corrupted by consumeristic concerns and are not personal or simple enough.
I was moved by the practice of many Javanese Buddhists, Daoists and Confucians — in the blending of traditions in their ornate Chinese temples — of venerating their departed ancestors or tradition founders. I watched these worshippers stand quietly before an image or photo, light joss sticks of incense and place the flaming symbols of their prayers into a container, then bow respectfully when their prayers were completed. Their ritual behavior caused me to think about typical Christian — especially Protestant or evangelical — practices, so characterized by a fear of “acting too Eastern or Catholic” that we do not give enough honor to our spiritual forebears.
I was influenced by the preparation my Muslim neighbors made for entering their prayer halls. The required washing ceremony called “wudu” — cleansing hands, face, arms, head and feet — is a way of spiritually purifying oneself to come before Allah. It was also striking that worshippers entered the sacred space quietly, a memory I recall when the noise level at my own church as people gather may represent fellowship but not awe or reverence.
Is envying other religions bad or good?
Taylor admits that, at first, she was a bit unsure about admiring aspects of other religions. She writes:
I would be leaving something important out of this book if I did not own up to a palpable fear that grabbed me the first few times my envy of another tradition drew me over to smell someone else’s rose. The fear was laced with flames and pitchforks. When it got hold of me, I was no longer an adult. I was a little child, scared to death of incurring my Heavenly Father’s wrath and losing his love forever.
We have been taught for so long that envy is always bad that looking at another religious expression or experience with envy, even if doing so could be considered “holy,” risks our feeling guilty of something vague. Added to that apprehension about breaking one of the Ten Commandments is our hesitancy, perhaps programmed from childhood, to see anything positive in the “misguided” beliefs of non-Christians, so one can understand Taylor’s fear and our own possible feelings of shame.
“Friendships we form with people who follow other faiths that enable us to be open to hearing about and coming to value their different religious ways.”
It is, however, the friendships we form with people who follow other faiths that enables us to be open to hearing about and coming to value their different religious ways, asserts Gustav Niebuhr, grandson of H. Richard Niebuhr and great nephew of Reinhold Niebuhr — two premier theologians of 20th-century America.
Presbyterian professor emeritus of Old Testament Eugene March describes his personal journey of knowing followers of other faiths, respecting and collaborating with them. Pursuing an intentional interaction with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, he was motivated by the “disconnect between (his) official theology and … unofficial experience of others.” Confessing the consequence of his spiritual journey, March writes:
The more I studied the Bible and the more I tried to understand and share my own faith, the clearer the conviction became that discipleship to Jesus invited a person into a very wide circle of people for whom God cares. Jesus is God’s love incarnate, and that love embraces the world. … Because I was claimed by Jesus Christ, I was impelled to find ways to understand and love others, especially others who on the surface seem to have a rather different worldview.
Our pluralistic society
Methodist Diana Eck, professor emeritus of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard Divinity School, has written a celebrated book about how America has become “the world’s most religiously diverse nation.” She notes our pluribus is more noticeable than ever. It features “our races and faces, our jazz and qawwali music, our Haitian drums and Bengali tablas, our hip-hop and bhangra dances, our mariachis and gamelans, our Islamic minarets and Hindu temple towers, our Mormon temple spires and golden gurdwara domes.”
Consequently, our national motto, E Pluribus Unum — “From Many, One” — has never been more true, which is causing many political and religious conservatives to fear the existential threat to Christian dominance in our country which they perceive to be occurring from unchecked immigration. Thus, it is our unum, our oneness, that is under attack.
It is this tension between maintaining the unum amid our multiplying pluribus that is reflected in the religious skirmishes in America. The crisis is intensified by the conflict between the universal and particular, according to Baptist professor and author Harvey Cox: “Those who glimpse the universal dimension advocate dialogue and mutuality. They search out what is common and that which unites. Those who emphasize the particular often shun dialogue and excoriate their fellow believers who engage in it more fiercely than they condemn outsiders.”
Cox says it often has been “easier to converse with universally minded Buddhists or Hindus than with fellow Christians who not only dismiss such people as pagans but also want to dismiss me for not recognizing it.”
That has been my experience also. As my daughter has sometimes chided me, “Dad, you relate better to your Wiccan priestess friend than you do to the fundamentalist Christians with whom you disagree about other religions.”
She’s correct, and I have lived with the resulting criticisms of my interreligious commitments. That kind of disapproval probably has made it challenging also for Cox, Eck, March and Niebuhr — as well as for Barbara Brown Taylor — to express their admiration for, their envy of, some aspects of the religious traditions of their neighbors.
Rethinking our relationship to God and ‘religious others’
Perhaps, however, the key to interreligious peace and the freedom to express our holy envy of others’ ways of approaching the divine can be found in reframing our view of our own religious relationship to God and kinship with those who are religiously different from ourselves. Taylor explains:
In his book God and the Universe of Faiths, British theologian John Hick makes a compelling argument. Before Copernicus, he says, earthlings believed they occupied the center of the universe — and why not? Earth was the place from which they saw everything else. It was the ground under their feet, and as far as they could tell everything revolved around them. Then Copernicus proposed a new map of the universe with the sun at the center and all the planets orbiting around it. His proposal raised religious questions as well as scientific ones, but he was right. The sun, not the earth, holds the planets in our solar system together.
Hick argues that it is past time for a Copernican revolution in theology, in which God assumes the prime place at the center and Christianity joins the orbit of the great religions circling around. Like the scientific revolution, this one requires the surrender of primary place and privileged view. Absolute truth moves to the center of the system, leaving people of good faith with meaningful perceptions of that truth from their own orbits. This new map does not require anyone to give up the claim to uniqueness. It only requires the acceptance of unique neighbors, who concur that the brightness they see at the center of everything exceeds their ability to possess it.
If we could understand our theology — and others — in this way, then our genuine envy of some of the ways our neighbors express their faith could not only be good but also holy.
Rob Sellers is professor of theology and missions emeritus at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon Seminary in Abilene, Texas. He is a past chair of the board of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. He and his wife, Janie, served a quarter century as missionary teachers in Indonesia. They have two children and five grandchildren.